2014 WBC: Day 7

Friday morning brought the finals for my team game, Le Havre. I was up against Pounder and a 3rd guy I didn't recognize. Thanks to the format for the tournament I again got to start in first seat due to my 2 wins in the heats. Pounder was the next highest seed so he was in second chair and I would again be fed by a 3rd guy who didn't have a history of success in the event. The first tile again had a wood on it and I got to start with 3 wood and the 4 cost building firm into marketplace. Unfortunately this time I was playing with someone else who really wanted to vendor the sawmill for half a wooden boat so Pounder jumped right into the marketplace. I think he'd first picked cash to buy the 6 cost building firm too, so he even got 3 things. In retrospect I now think maybe it's right to not build the marketplace, especially if someone else buys the 6 cost building firm. Maybe I should be first picking clay so I can grab a single iron and build the sawmill the hard way?

Anyway, the colliery was pretty easy to access in this game (under both the clay mound and black market) and I set up to get it. Pounder build the building on top of them, righty bought the clay mound, and I was able to buy the black market and construction firm up the colliery and the local court. Which I vendor shortly thereafter for a wooden boat of my own! Pounder is all in on operation use the colliery, and so is the 3rd guy, actually to the exclusion of taking what had always seemed like a required grab of 2 iron. Twice during the mid-game I got to take 3 iron offers... Now this does mean I was also turning down at least 2 shots at 2 iron, so it's not like people were going crazy. But I definitely had a ton of iron. I'd also managed to pull off a couple of big black market grabs (2 iron, 2 cows and 2 iron, 2 wood, 2 francs) which may have made the other players leery about taking 2 iron and giving up another black market play?

At one point I'd made 6 bricks because I had a bunch of clay and there were some good buildings available and then I made a double build of cokery and steel mill. I'm not sure how right that was. They are worth 40 points combined which is a pretty good action, but it also meant I was going to be at the end of the line for converting coal to coke and then iron to steel. The coal totals were something like 21 for Pounder, 17 for me, and 9 for the 3rd guy? (One of the special buildings let you convert food to coal and charcoal and Pounder killed his cows in order to use that building while I did not.) The iron totals were more like 2 for Pounder, 3 for 3rd guy, 6 for me so I felt like even getting to make stuff 3rd it would probably still work out ok for me. Then the town built a special building (I never once used the marketplace so I didn't know what could be coming) and the steel works hit. 15 energy and one iron for two steel. Pounder now suddenly had a really good way to get the stuff for multiple steel ships. This felt like a real problem for me and I went into the tank. I ended up deciding I had no way to handle it and just bought it so I'd at least get some entry fee action back. Pounder went to it and was able to snag the first steel ship. Then he went back for 2 more and could get the second one. I ended up getting to make my coke and decided that rather than wait around for the 3rd steel ship I'd just ship a bunch of coke and buy the second one. I did later build the 4th one as well.

As the game wound down I ended up counting up my symbols and found I had almost all of the bank related symbols and was able to buy it for a profit. I don't think I mentioned it, but I did the same thing in the semifinals with the town hall. Rarely is it ever worthwhile to pay the hugely inflated prices for those buildings but I got to do it two games in a row. Woo!

I ended up breaking 300 for the 3rd game in a row. Pounder came in at around 276 and the 3rd guy was around 200. Victory!

Pounder and I then headed to the Agricola room to play in the noon heat. We arrived and most of the players were already seated even though we were about 5 minutes early. I guess the Agricola crowd is a lot of eager beavers. Unfortunately for us the GM had underestimated how many tables he'd need and we ended up standing around with Sceadeau and it looking like we would all have to play each other despite showing up on time for the heat. This is contrast to the previous heat where they'd started too many tables and I was going to get stuck at a 5 player game until Elaine stepped up for us. This heat ended up having a few more people straggle in and they were able to start 2 tables from those of us standing around. I get the desire for efficiency but it does feel like pre-pairing people before knowing how many games will need to happen is error prone. But I guess for most people it probably worked out great?

I ended up at a table with Pounder, Steve LeWinter, and a 4th I don't remember. I didn't get the guildmaster this game so I didn't know what to do. In fact, I don't remember a single thing about this game. Except that I came 3rd and Steve won.

I could have gone to play Spyrium or Stone Age but the right choice was definitely to eat. Pounder, Sceadeau, and I walked to Red Robin and Elaine met us there with their car. I tried out their salted caramel milkshake because I love salt on everything. Except, it turns out, in a milkshake. It was not very tasty and I didn't drink very much of it at all. The burger was delicious though!

I then could have gone to play Wits & Wagers but decided to chill in the room for a bit. That got boring and I eventually wandered down and found that Pounder, Robb, Sara, and Duncan were a team for Wits & Wagers and there was a spare chair right beside them... Ok, fine, Wits & Wagers it is! I got to the game in time to share my wisdom about fish. The fastest fish in the world definitely clocked in at a massive FOUR miles per hour! We ended up losing everything at the end but that's ok because the rules are made up and the points don't matter!

Following Wits & Wagers was potentially the Agricola semifinals. Would a 1st, a 2nd, and a 3rd be good enough to advance? Turns out the answer was yes! The semifinals were going to use the WM deck mixed in with the E, I, and K decks. This was going to be a problem for me since I've never seen WM cards. Daniel showed me a few of the better ones but then I got thrown into the deep end. I started off by taking a guy that lets you get an extra building resource each time you take building resources but you have to spread them out on the board to collect later. Turning reed+stone+food into reed+stone+stone+food felt good to me, so I decided to run it. I then got passed guildmaster (that guy's good with extra stone!) and then stonecutter! I now had a plan for my game. Collect some stone and try to buy all of the stone things. The minor were passed the other way and the guy passing to me (Rob, the GM) made a comment about how he was really hooking me up with one card in his pack. I looked through the 6 cards and couldn't see anything amazing. There was a baking tray that would combo very well with my stonecutter... But there was also a WM card that looked very confusing. It was a ram that ate food each harvest and cost a sheep to play but counted as a sheep for breeding and scoring. It also let you breed sheep 4 extra times during the game. A single stable would be enough to let the ram and a sheep breed up an extra sheep for 2 food over and over again. Assuming you had a fireplace anyway. I assumed that since it was the card I didn't recognize and that the pack had a 'bomb' in it that it must be that card and took it. It turns out that was a mistake. Maybe I was getting pranked? Rob later said baking tray was the bomb card though it ended up going 4th and went unplayed. I sure wish I'd had it though since it would have been awesome with my stonecutter. *sigh* I then took a card that lets you demolish a built wooden room for 7 fences. You have to build fences before you reno but if you pull that off it feels really good. I used that to get enough space to breed sheep normally and didn't really need the bonus from the ram. I eventually played him because I'm stubborn and it was a minor food bonus (and a point) but taking him over the baking tray probably cost me the game. I also ended up with the cabinetmaker (4 wood if guildmaster is already in play) and the village well. My game plan was pretty clear. Collect lots of resources and build as many majors as I could get my grubby little hands on.

It worked out pretty well, though I misplayed at one point. I had the resources to build the pottery and I wanted to play guildmaster. If I build pottery first and then play guildmaster I get 2 clay. If I do it the other way I get 4 clay. 4 is bigger than 2! Unfortunately I played guildmaster and then Rob snap bought the pottery. I actually needed the 2 food from the pottery to feed myself that round and ended up having to take 3 food off traveling players instead. Doing it the other way safeties the contract and might have been enough in and of itself to win me the game. Certainly if I had baking tray I feel like I'd have won the game. As it is I ended up coming a pretty close 3rd, and then probably only because no one else at the table had read one of the cards played by the guy on my right. It made a single cow into a 4 point play for him and other people could have taken it as a good point action for themselves and screwed him. Considering how close the game was that was probably the difference. The guy on my right (Eric) ended up winning by a point over Rob who was a couple points ahead of me. I do feel like with more practice (and having ever seen the WM deck) I probably win that game. Oh well. There's always next year?

This game finished in time for Liar's Dice so I ran off to play at a table with Robb, Sceadeau, Pounder, Elaine, and Andy Latto. Robb smoked us and then chose more Liar's Dice over Waffle House. Mistakes! Waffle House so good!

2013 WBC Day 7

Friday morning brought the Le Havre final at the stupidly early hour of 9am. One advantage of being sick all week is I'd gotten plenty of sleep the last few days, so my sleep batteries were all charged up. I got around 6 or 7 hours sleep, woke up, bought a Coke, and was in pretty good shape relatively speaking. I was still a little sick and I absolutely detest waking up so I still wasn't in a very good mood and wasn't thinking perfectly clearly but compared to previous years it was just fine.

The format this year had 3 semifinal games with the closest second also advancing. One of the winners said he has a hard time waking up and might well just sleep through it since we wouldn't move it. Which provides a bit of a conundrum... If that happened, should the final switch to a 3 player game? Should they advance the next closest second instead? That would mean he needs to also wake up at 9am and might not even get to play. What if he doesn't show either? The next next closest second? How far down the chain do we go to find a 4th player? Any warm body? Making the situation even stickier the person who is 2nd in line is the GM himself. So if he rules that we keep taking people it's to his own benefit. But if he rules that we stop at him to avoid looking like he's ruling in his own favour he actually ends up ruling against himself which is really terrible. GMing is rough enough as it is, you don't need any rules swung against you. He ended up deciding to let #5 in if it came up, but was going to decline his own spot. I think that will seem fairer on first inspection for most people so it's probably a good thing, but I think it sucks for him. It ended up not mattering since the actual 4 finalists did show up.

The final table included one of last year's finalists (another Nick) and two people new to the finals this time around. Another Nick was on my immediate right and was one of the people in last year's finals who got screwed by iron parity, and was well aware that that was probably why he lost that game.

I was in third chair. I haven't yet found the time/inclination to work out which seats may have an advantage or not. I'm pretty sure first chair is strongest, especially if a wood tile flips up first. Which it did in this game. I believe second player got 3 clay, and then I got 2 wood myself. It also seems like people don't like to spend their early money, so I also got to buy the 4 cost building firm. Interestingly no one took money to buy the marketplace. Not only that, but first player who took wood also didn't build the marketplace! So when it got back to my turn I was able to build it with my wood. I mentioned how I got both the 4 cost building firm and the marketplace in the semis and how Robb imprinted in my brain how ridiculous a setup it is to let someone have both. And here I am with both of them again. Will it continue to be ridiculous?

The location of the iron tile meant that 1st and 3rd seats were going to have good iron parity. We would always get first crack at 2 iron until someone snapped and took the single iron. For the second year in a row the other finalists refused to take 1 iron, so myself and the guy opposite me got to scoop up 2 iron offer after 2 iron offer. On top of this source of iron, and my marketplace, I also decided that my conclusion from the last game with the hardware store was a reasonable one so I was jumping over to it as well which was giving me an absolutely ridiculous amount of iron. I may even have used the black market once to get 2 iron and 2 of something else!

One key play, for me, was how everyone seemed to be neglecting the harvest phase of the game. Another Nick quickly took 2 cows and a grain but no one else was harvesting anything at all. Which meant the cow offer kept getting bigger and bigger. Eventually I took it when it was at 5! As the second person to get cows that's mind boggling. Of course I didn't take it at 2, 3, or 4 either, so I don't know that I can say other people were making mistakes either. But that one action probably gave me the resources to score 60+ points.

I had marketplace control again, which meant I got to manipulate the special buildings. There wasn't one I wanted to keep buried this game, but there was one I wanted to make sure came out. Harbour watch, which is probably the single most game warping card in the deck. It's a building that lets you use any occupied building by paying them a dollar. This means you can't block people from building boats, or from getting in all the shipping phases they want, or from picking up coal in the colliery. It means you basically get to ignore the opposition for my preferred line of play. It also means owning the colliery is even more critical than normal, so as soon as I saw this building existed I went out of my way to make a plan to get the colliery. The colliery was buried under the clay mound and the arts center I think. My play ended up being go to the construction firm, build the arts center, sell the arts center, buy the clay mound, build the colliery. A short time later I got some money (maybe by going to the cokery) and bought the harbour watch. I tried to convince people that they should be using my harbour watch in order to use my colliery but it rarely happened.

A little later on the feed lot came out, and no one had much interest in it, so I was able to do a big shipping phase to get down to 2 cows and then buy it like in the semis. Then I got to make 2 cows a turn for a while for lots of extra things to ship.

As the game played out I pretty much ignored steel entirely. The steel mill was late to come out and Another Nick was waiting on it instead of building iron ships. I think this ended up setting him back way too far. When it finally did come out he was able to make 11 steel and then was able to start building boats and setting up to ship all the stuff he'd acquired over the game, but by that point I'd already flat out bought 2 of the 4 steel ships. Guy on my left had made 2 steel with the business office and had built one also, so there was only one left for Another Nick which was really bad for his position. I ended up with 2 steel ships, 2 iron ships, and a wooden ship. The 2 steel and the wood I had bought with cash money, the iron I had made with all the iron I'd picked up.

I was paying attention to when the town was going to build a building late in the game this time, and spent the money to buy the bridge over the Seine in order to force the town to build the town hall. One of the other players was set up to build it and I wanted to keep that from happening.

I also got a late grain offer with 9 or 10 grain in it, which let me bake the full 20 loaves of bread near the end of the game. I got to ship many, many times thanks to the harbour watch. Probably 6 or 7 times, with some of those times being for 16 goods. Lots of cows, bread, and coke. I ended the game with no goods left at all.

The other players at the table were pretty much ready to concede early in the game because I had such a big lead. I thought Another Nick could catch me, but he waited too long on steel and ran out of time. I don't remember final standings, but I think he did come second. I won, by a pretty good margin. Good thing we didn't submit a team this year, it sure would have sucked to win my team event. 8P

1 o'clock brought the single elimination Innovation tournament. The caffeine from the first Coke I'd had in many weeks was keeping me ready to roll and I wasn't really feeling super sick anymore. Still sluggish with a cough, but not like I wanted to die. So I went to that. I got paired up with Rob Kircher in the first round which is a bit of a tough draw because he's really good at games and I'm really good at games. I hardly play any Innovation and I know I'm a lot worse than Robb and Pounder so I didn't have terribly high hopes. Andy (the GM) came by to watch us because he said we were the tough match for the round. (There was a mulligan round, so a lot of the really good players weren't playing in this round at all.) I ended up in a relatively bad position and Rob had enough points to get his last achievement but needed to get a 7 into play. His last turn was to draw a couple 7s and I didn't have a way to make him discard both of them. So he was going to get to play one and achieve to win the game on his next turn. I had a bunch of cards in play and finally came up with a viable line of play. I could reveal a green card from my hand and steal all his green cards. If both of his 7s were green then this play would prevent him from winning on his turn. Also, if they were green I would get to meld them all, and all my green cards, which included the card that lets you auto-win if you have 10 or more green cards in play. I had 8 of my own, so if he had 2 of them I would win on my next turn! I'd seen 3 of the 7s, and none of them were green, so there was a non-zero chance this play would work. 1 in 21, I believe! It turned out his 7s were a yellow and purple so it didn't work, but it made me happy to at least find a line of play that had a chance of working. It's like I'm changing the rules for victory and gaining status even though I lost! Yay, dopamine!

Most of the games I would normally play are done by this point in the week. There are still semis and finals and such, but I didn't make any of those because I didn't play any games earlier in the week. And I still wasn't really feeling like playing a lot of games. So I just sat around and watched the rest of the Innovation tournament. I feel like I probably went to Red Robin with Pounder after the Innovation event, but I may be misremembering. Maybe I just ate gluten free cookies. Then I played some Rogue Legacy back in the room after doing a blog post.

11pm brought Liar's Dice. I couldn't turn down my chance to be the LIAR'S DICE CHAMPION OF THE WORLD!!!!!! even though I didn't want to be in a room with 1250 dice being rolled at once with my foggy brain. I played at a table with Robb, Sceadeau, Pounder, and a couple of random dudes. I lost very quickly. Sceadeau was very mean to me and knocked me out. I wasn't the first one eliminated in the whole event so I didn't get made fun of by the whole room but it was pretty close. Pounder 'won', but he didn't want to advance so he conceded to the kid at the table who was very confused about the outcome. It's a little sketchy to me (I'd rather have Pounder eliminate everyone and just not show up to the next round if he doesn't want to play) but with a game like Liar's Dice I don't think anyone actually cares.

Hanabi was the open gaming game of the convention and Robb was one of the few people who owned a copy of the game so he was swarmed by people to play it after Liar's Dice. I sat around and watched for a bit, and then was learning some weird Flower Fall game from Matt when Randy came up and asked if we'd go learn Copycat instead. I don't have the ability to interrupt the start of a game and convince the people in it to do something else instead, but Randy does, and I'd rather learn Copycat than Flower Fall so it was all good by me. Matt ended up winning the Copycat event later in the week so he was probably just fine with getting in an extra game too.

Copycat is a game that copies game mechanics from all kinds of games and tries to kludge them all together into a good game. Some of the people I talked to thought they did a great job. I thought it was very mediocre personally. It was incredibly bland, and while the mechanics from different games were all there it didn't feel like the fun parts of those games came with the mechanics. You build a deck like in Dominion, but with the game lasting at most 11 turns and with new cards only getting shuffled in the turn after you buy them it felt like building a good/fun deck didn't matter enough. There are decisions to make on which cards to buy and which cards to trash but the game didn't last long enough for it to really feel like it matters like it does in Dominion or even A Few Acres of Snow. That said, the game was still pretty long and felt like it was dragging. Worker placement from Agricola is probably at fault here. You're placing workers down on pretty minorly relevant spaces, but there are a bunch of them and you get presented with the illusion of choice. Do I want to draw a card, or make a dollar, or earn a point? But when it comes right down to it drawing a card is worth a dollar or a point and neither of those really matter either. So it again feels like you're making decisions (which takes time) but the decisions you're making have no theme or major consequence. Through The Ages and Puerto Rico show up with mechanics, but they didn't get the good ones out of those games.

Perhaps worst of all, I didn't get to end the game on the score track. I ended with a score of 91, but the score track went 90-92-93-94-93-95. No space for 91. I fell off into the abyss never to be heard from again.

The rules are also very badly written. It wasn't at all clear if we could do some of the abusive things we wanted to do, and that made the game experience suck for me. A lot of the cards and actions are about copying other cards or actions (the 'theme' of the game being copying stuff) and one of the rules shows up in bold talking about how you can only use the base of any given card twice total. Once for the card, once for a copy. That is all. But then the explanation text for a card goes on to say how you can end up tripling some cards. And there's a card that says it comes in as a copy of a different card, not that it copies the effect of a card. So can you play that card as a copy of a good card, and then use two copy effects to copy both of those? In some senses you're getting the base of the first card 4 times. In other senses you're getting 2 cards 2 times each.

No one knew how to actually resolve it, which meant part of me was stuck feeling like I'd been cheated because the other players had done some super copying, and part of me was stuck feeling like I should be able to do the same things but would be cheating myself. It just didn't feel good. Come back, dopamine! Come back!

We then went to Waffle House, but made the mistake of showing up at 2:30 am on a Friday night. So the bars had just recently shut down and all the drunk people were at Waffle House, filling it up and making service very slow. I was more than a little worried about contamination issues but they managed to keep me from getting sick for a third time with the scrambled eggs, hash browns, and ham.

2012 WBC Day 7 Summary

Friday morning brought the finals for my team game: Le Havre. Apparently all three of the other finalists had failed to win a heat and had all advanced as alternates. I'm not sure how I feel about that. It's one thing to fill a semifinal field up with alternates to make for properly sized games... But the semifinal field has 12 people which includes those 3 alternates. We could have played 3 3-player games with a 3 player final instead. And I'm not just saying this because I prefer 3 player games in Le Havre. Vegas Showdown didn't advance any alternates because it hit 20 winners who showed up even though it meant different sized semifinals from finals and I think that makes sense. I didn't win a heat therefore I shouldn't feel like I deserve a semifinal slot. If it's a game like Tigris which can play as a 3er but really needs to be a 4er then I think it makes more sense. Oh well.

At any rate I ended up in first chair with a fish/wheat tile coming up. This means I don't have an awesome first choice (3 wood or maybe 2 clay) and ended up taking 2 wood. I also bought the 4 cost building firm. As the tiles came out it became clear that I had good iron tempo and good cow tempo. (I would get first choice of 2 iron every 4th time through the game unless someone took a single iron.) No one ever broke the iron tempo so myself and the guy across from me (Ken, the GM) got 2 iron every single time it came out. This denied both the other two players any iron for an awfully long time. Chris went for a marketplace plan which let him get some iron but the other guy pretty much ignored iron and got a poor score as a result. Oddly it seemed like only Ken and I wanted to go to the black market to scoop up the 2 iron from it as well.

One of the special buildings was the harbour watch which changed the game significantly. I took a buck offer and bought it as soon as it came out since I figured it would get used a lot by the other players. It didn't, which surprised me, though I did use it a lot myself. I got my game plan to function pretty well with a lot of shipping on 3 iron and a steel ship. Mostly bread and cows but some extra coke and steel as well. Unfortunately for me Ken was implementing almost the same plan. He got most of the other iron ships and a couple of the steel ones. He had both wharves and the colliery which meant he earned a lot of money from entry fees. (He pulled off the build wharf-buy black market-build colliery play.) It felt like I got my share of everything for my plan but someone else got way more than their share because the other players weren't going for it. He was one step ahead of me most of the way. He made coke first, and steel first, and got the higher valued boats. He also got a luxury liner. The end result had Ken way out in front with me a distant second and the other two a fair bit behind me. I continue my streak of finishing behind Daniel and one other guy in the finals. This time Daniel didn't make the finals so I got second. Maybe next year no one else will show up and I can win!

We finished in under 3 hours so I had time to go play another heat of Race for funsies. I already had 2 wins so I was going to advance anyway but I like the game. This round was played using the first expansion and goals. I forget exactly what I did but I ended up getting both of the big goals and a lot of other points for a large victory.

I didn't have anything I really wanted to do until 5pm and the Race semis. I went back to the room to screw around and ended up going to Red Robin for lunch with Robb and Pounder once they realized they had a bye through the first round of Innovation thanks to the mulligan round.

5pm was the Race semis which were actually quarters. They had 30 winners show up and decided to advance them all. They went with the somewhat odd plan of playing 8 games (6 4-player games and 2 3-player games) with the top 2 of each game advancing. They seeded the #1 and #2 seeds into the 3 player games (a pretty huge advantage since 2 of 3 would advance). With 3 heat wins I was the #1 seed and got into a 3 player game. We played with the first 2 expansions and my game got off to a pretty silly start. My home world was the one where I draw a card for each rebel planet during produce. The first three actions were develop, settle, produce. I developed space marines, settled a rebel planet, and drew 2 cards in produce. One of the other players kept calling produce for me (I don't know if he was trying to make me win with him second or if it was legitimately his best play but it sure hooked me up) and I ended up with 2 galactic federation cards in my hand. There's only supposed to be one in the game. We decided that since I had them both I should just throw one away and get a new card. So I ended up with a bunch of rebel worlds worth tons of points and tons of 6-cost developments worth tons of points for a really huge score. The third player ended up accidentally cheating by playing a military planet he couldn't conquer and no one noticed for a few turns. We didn't know how to deal with it but it was pretty obvious from the boards that he was going to be last anyway so we just played on. The game ended soon thereafter for a huge win for me.

The semifinals were all 4 player games with only 1 player advancing. I was in a game with the same dude from my Le Havre semi who did everything he could to throw that game to one of my opponents. He did the same thing in Race as well. One guy was set up for a huge produce/shipx2 cycle. Dude kept calling produce for him so the guy got to keep shipx2ing for huge points. I don't think it was intentional by any stretch of the imagination. I just think he plays games obliviously and it ended up really screwing me hard in this game. The winner was up by 20 something with me in second. Second wasn't worth anything in this game though! I think I ended up getting 6th but unfortunately Race is a 3 plaque event so no sand for me.

7pm had Battle Line starting in the Race room. My race game ended at 6:58. I figured I'd give it a spin. I got blown out of my first two games and ended up in an irrelevant third game against someone with 2 breakthrough wins. I did manage to beat him so I finished at a 1-2 record.

I considered playing Ingenious at 10pm but was actually watching the League of Legends arena (the internet worked enough to stream a low quality feed) and the Olympics in the room with Robb and Pounder and didn't feel like leaving.

11pm was Liar's Dice which we did go to. I played at a table with Robb and he prevented me from becoming the LIAR'S DICE CHAMPION OF THE WORLD for another year. I lost my first 2 or 3 dice on exactas on the other side of the table and then walked right into Robb having nothing of my bid to lose the rest of them.

Waffle House for a 3-egg + plain hashbrowns meal. Then bed.

Liar's Dice

I played a game of Liar's Dice at Lounge Day which lasted a mere 2 turns for me. I lost 6 dice on my second action! I thought the bid was very reasonable to make at the time so the question I need to answer is if I merely got very unlucky or if I played badly in combination with getting unlucky.

I bid 11 2's with 4 2's in my own cup. There were 22 outstanding dice that I couldn't see and a 1 in 3 chance that each of those dice could be a 2 or a wild. The expected value from my point of view was a little more than 7 more 2's which when added to my own 4 made my bid of 11 2's conservative! It turned out Pounder on my left had none at all and challenged my bid. From his point of view there were also 22 outstanding dice so I'd likely overbid by 4. Even if you assign 4 of my dice to be 2's there are only 17 outstanding dice after those. This means there aren't even going to be 10 of them and challenging my bid is still pretty safe for him. Even if I have all 5 there's a good chance I'm going down. The chance that I'm bidding on air needs to be considered as well! So my first flaw is looking at it from my point of view and not from Pounder's likely point of view.

Of course, if he has a couple 2s he can't possibly challenge me. Even a single 2 means his challenge has to be based on putting me on a stone cold bluff instead of on a reasonable EV bid. Maybe he'd do that. Maybe he wouldn't. Heck, if he would do that I really like my bid since we were playing with an odd exacta rule which makes me really want to have a reasonable bid get challenged.

The actual result was that there was a single 2 between the 22 outstanding dice. So I lost 6 dice and was out of the game. That result felt astronomically unlikely and I wanted to take a look at the odds of that happening and the odds of getting reasonably called by Pounder at each of his possible number of 2s.

My first thought was to just build a spreadsheet like I did for Can't Stop but then I stopped and considered just how big a number 6^22 is. Yeah, not going to happen. But since each die roll is independent I should be able to make use of Markov Chains!

With 22 rolls the odds of getting 1 or fewer of a specific number is .16%. Pretty unlikely for sure, but not nearly as astronomical as I was thinking. The odds of there being 6 or fewer (and therefore my bid being a loser) is 36.2%. Those odds aren't too bad, especially with almost 15.6% being a 1 die loss and another almost 11% being a mere 2 die loss. Of course, this is still treating Pounder as a vacuum who doesn't take his own dice into account when he challenges...

First thing's first... What are the odds of each of Pounder's possible die rolls?

0 - 13%
1 - 33%
2 - 33%
3 - 16%
4 - 4%
5 - .4%

And with each of his possible results, what are the odds I have a loser if he challenges?

0 - 67%
1 - 48%
2 - 28%
3 - 13%
4 - 4%
5 - 1%

I'm a little surprised at the 1 number. Even if I have 4 matching dice under my cup if Pounder only has a singleton of my bid he'll be correct to challenge almost half the time. Depending on the psychology of the player in Pounder's spot this may or may not be ok. If they're willing to show the one die and re-roll the rest the bid is a big winner. If they're going to challenge then it isn't. And if I ever make big bluffs they'll be even more correct to challenge borderline bids like this one! Assuming Pounder will make the challenge at 0 and 1 and let the rest slide what is my total expected outcome?

53.4% - game keeps going as Pounder makes a bid
24.6% - I lose some dice
 6.3% - I win an exacta
15.7% - Pounder loses some dice

Considering this is a 6 player game and I have 18% of the dice it seems less than optimal to lose dice 24.6% of the time. Especially since I could very well lose dice in the 'game on' category as well. Playing it a little safer is probably a wiser thing to do. I like putting the screws to the person on my left (the idea being it likely won't get back around to me) but if the cost of putting the screws is to lose more than my fair share of the time it seems suboptimal. Consider what would happen if I'd bet only 10 2's... At this point Pounder has to bid on with anything except 0 2's...

86.4% - game keeps going as Pounder makes a bid
 6.2% - I lose some dice
 2.5% - I win an exacta
 4.9% - Pounder loses some dice

This is now a very safe bet. The odds of losing anything at all aren't very high. Even with 0 2's Pounder might even bid on anyway since there are lots of reasonably safe options for him if he has any set of numbers to bid himself. The only problem is I may well be put to a real test on my next turn around the table. Hopefully by then some dice will be revealed and the variance will be reduced!

WBC 2008 -> Day 4

Prelude
Day 0
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
PR Finals
Recap

So many nights in a row staying up late to play games is eventually going to catch up with you. The Queen's Gambit 'finals' were starting at noon and I wanted to play in that and nothing earlier really caught my eye so I decided to just sleep in until 11ish so I could shower and then Gambit it up.

Queen's Gambit - round of 16 - 12pm - I didn't make the cut to top 16 because for some reason the GM had me down in the 'doesn't own the game' pile so my win in my first round played wasn't good enough. Apparently several other people were in the wrong piles as well and after a little complaining the GM redid the standings. He was not happy about having to do this, especially since he obviously thought some of us were cheating. (Robb could have used my game in the first round, for example, and 'owned' a copy of the game.) I actually own a copy of the game and was the only one to use it so I didn't feel too bad about standing up for myself and getting into the top 16. I don't really agree with that rule as a tiebreaker but since it exists it should be used. (Especially since I’d bought a copy of the game partially because of the rule and certainly had only played one preliminary round because it was going to be good enough because of the rule.)

At any rate, they finally get things sorted out and I’m into the top 16. The really sad thing is we didn’t even use my copy of the game this round because they had enough copies already set up during the kerfuffle. I was matched up against Rob Flowers, the El Grande GM who is an all around nice guy. I bid 1 droid to play as the dark side and won the bidding. Rob took to the tactic of running everyone upstairs with window ledge movement and cleared out all my stuff up top. He eventually managed to get about 12 guards and Captain Panaka into the throne room, with Panaka in the door so I’d have to kill him to get at the guards. Both queens also made it up to the top floor. Unfortunately for Rob I won the Jedi battle handily and Darth Maul came a knocking. Maul eventually killed both queens and Panaka, opening the door for my destroyer droids to finally pour into the throne room and mop up the rest of the guards.

Queen’s Gambit – quarter-finals – 2pm – This time I played Dark Side for no cost, I think. This was an incredible close game, where I lost the Jedi battle but managed to kill an awful lot of guards in the early game. The game was winding down and my opponent got into a situation where he had Obi Wan, the fake queen, and a few guards alive. Obi Wan was running back and forth killing what few droids I was managing to get close to his guards, but due to card stacking (playing no cards one turn and then 4 the next to move droids) I was slowly able to kill them off. On the final turn of the game he only had 1 guard left and positioned Obi Wan in the wrong hex. One spot over and I wouldn’t have had a shot, but as it was if I’d played a move 8 spaces card I could just get into range for a shot. It was my next card, I ran up and took my 50% shot at the win and hit. Woo! It turns out his next card had the potential to win him the game. He rolled it out ‘just to see’ and would have won. (Of course, butterflies in Africa would have changed the roll so that proves nothing! Nothing I say!)

Queen’s Gambit – semi-finals – 4pm – For a change of pace I think I bid 1 guard to play light side this game. Why? I don’t know! At any rate, I managed to barely win the Jedi battle and ended up killing every single droid in the palace. I clogged up the entrance so my opponent could no longer move more droids in, so my palace setup was a guaranteed win. As soon as Anakin made it to the end of the track I would win and there was nothing my opponent could do to stop it. My opponent recognized this and conceded. A spectator (Larry Lingle, a previous champion) pointed out that he shouldn’t concede because I might just miss on every Anakin card I would play. My opponent couldn’t win, but maybe I’d get fantastically unlucky and I couldn’t win either.

Now, to make sure games end in 2 hours they put in a rule such that the dark side wins if time runs out. (Supposedly the light side is the better side, and also they’re the ones who can just stall out by not playing Anakin cards to try to get an advantage elsewhere.) It’s not the greatest rule but you need some way to make games end fast so I can’t really complain. The issue here is that if we keep playing and I whiff on every Anakin my opponent would win. Larry was strongly advocating my opponent take actions that couldn’t change the game position to waste time, and called over a GM to force my opponent to unconcede. The GM came over and ruled that the game could keep going if my opponent wanted it to. He seemed unsure but Larry kept badgering and the GM wasn’t trying to dissuade him so he gave in. We set the board back up and continued the game.

I should point out that when he conceded the first time there was over an hour left in the round and I basically just needed to win 4 coin flips in that hour. Of course in the time it took to decide to keep playing we’d wasted 20 minutes. It quickly became apparent, however, that my opponent had no interest in stalling out and was just trying to appease Larry. (My opponent was like 14 years old and didn’t look too happy to have adults and authority figures telling him he was wrong to have conceded. I honestly just stayed out of it for the most part because I knew I would win if we kept playing, no matter what Larry had to say about potentially getting unlucky.) He took no actions on his turn, basically just letting me cycle through my deck playing Anakin cards as fast as humanly possible. I won 5 minutes later.

It turns out my opponent had beaten Larry in the previous round, and therefore if he’d advanced Larry would have had a higher finish. Robb also pointed out when I told him what happened that this was Larry’s team game so he had a lot to gain by changing the outcome of my match. At the time I was a little annoyed that a random spectator was getting involved in the match but I was even more annoyed when I found out he had something to gain. (Especially since this wasn’t even something that could conceivably have mattered.) If there was 5 minutes left in the round, sure, advocate we keep playing. But we had more than half the round and I had a hard lock on the board and my opponent knew it. Oh well.

As a result of this incident I decided to never play light side again. You see, I play fast. I will sometimes pause to consider a rough choice but I tend to get a pretty good idea of the right plan and can follow it very quickly. It doesn’t matter how fast I play as light side if I get paired against a slow dark side opponent, or if they intentionally stall. Initially I didn’t think this would be a problem but since a former champion and the GM both strongly advocated intentionally stalling I decided I had no choice in the matter. I refuse to put myself in a situation where I need to call the GM over because my opponent is playing slow, and I refuse to lose as a result of not calling one. Therefore I will play dark side (despite it being the worst side) and I will play fast and the games will end. The only way a game won’t end if I play dark side is if my opponent is incredibly slow, and in that case I don’t mind that he loses.

Queen’s Gambit – finals – 6pm – I bid 1 to play dark side and win the bidding. (The fact I have to pay to play the weaker side is aggravating, but thems the breaks.) This game featured both of us rolling abysmally in the Jedi battle. Fortunately for me my droids in the palace were on complete fire. They should hit 50% of the time but were running over 90%. Eventually I generated enough bonus cards to win the Jedi battle and Darth Maul came out and cleaned out the palace. I’m pretty sure with my droids doing as much early as they did that I would have won easily even if I’d lost the Jedi battle. The fact I won it made it a foregone conclusion. It was probably my most lopsided match of the whole event. (Don’t get me wrong, my opponent played very well, the dice just came out strongly in my favour.)

Wits & Wagers – 8pm – This is a fun team trivia game run as a seminar so there’s no real prizes. It’s just an excuse to spend a couple hours having good times with good people. The trivia answers are also solely numbers, which I appreciate. Last year I teamed with Pounder, Robb, Lin, Rich Atwater (the Titan 2 GM) and some guy Lin met. This year Robb, Pounder and I resumed our coalition with Rich and two random dudes joined in. (There is a limited number of teams who can play but no limit to the number of people on each team!) Sorry I don’t remember your names, random dudes, but it was fun having you on our team!

We mostly picked out answers democratically, which unfortunately means that when the two random guys knew the answer and the rest of us thought we did but didn’t we ended up submitting the wrong answer. We had great success last year at this event, this year not so much. We got completely blown out, but we had fun and that’s all that matters!

Steak – 10pm – You may notice I very rarely mention food in this report. Sometimes I managed to sneak away between rounds and grab a hot dog or something, but for the most part games > food and we all know it. Pounder tries to make Robb and I eat when he can for our own good, but we all too often ignore him. At any rate, I’d played 8 straight hours of Queen’s Gambit and followed it up with the trivia game so I was starved. Someone had told Robb about a good actual restaurant that was likely still open downtown, so off we went. I had a nice steak; it was much needed and much appreciated. Of course the downside to this is Liar’s Dice started at 11 and there was no way we’d be back in time to play in it. I’ve always stated that I _will_ be the Liar’s Dice World Champion, but it seemed it would have to wait another year.

Liar’s Dice – 11:10pm – It turns out when hundreds of people show up to play an event it’s tricky to get them all going right at the start time. Games were in progress when we popped in to see what was up but the GM waved us over and said we could still join. The only downside is we’d have to play at the same table as each other, which is ok because clearly I’m better than Robb and Pounder at Liar’s Dice. Unfortunately it turns out the GM is better than all three of us and took us (and two other people) down rather quickly. Doh!

Imperial – 11:40pm – It’s not healthy to go to sleep so soon after eating (that’s my story and I’m sticking to it) so we had to find something else to do before going to bed. Pounder expressed interest in learning Imperial and while I’d read the rules and had watched a game on BSW I’d never played so I was in for learning as well. This turned out to be a game in the ‘Rondel’ series. In this game there are 6 European countries vying for military and industrial power. The twist is the players don’t play the countries; instead they play investors who are backing the countries. Whoever has invested the most money in a country controls the actions they take on the country’s turn. Those actions can make the country better or make the investor’s in the country money. (This often worsens the country’s position.) It was an interesting game, but Pounder ended up having his initial countries bought up by Robb and me so he only got to make choices once every six turns. He turned out to have a winning strategy though, as he won by a fair margin. Having only played once I can’t say if that was an aberration or not, but any game where the winning strategy isn’t fun has problems.

WBC 'report', Part 2

So you've just stayed up extra late learning a new game and there's nothing good at 9am the next morning... What do you do? If you answered sleep in then you are a wiser man than I, for I chose to get up early and play in the Risk event. Risk is not what I would call a terribly good game. It's also not very fun if you're playing with the wrong kind of person, but that's something I forgot. Plus, Risk is the 'most normal' game at WBC and I kinda wanted to be able to name a game people recognized if they asked me what I'd done. My grandmother knows how to play Risk, she's almost certainly never heard of anything else at WBC.

At any rate, it was a 6 player game and I went first. The way people placed on the board I ended up the only person with a force in South America. There were 2 people in Australia, 2 in Europe, 1 in North America, and 1 in Africa. Having not played the game in years I'd forgotten how brutal the turn-in scheme was, going first I think I probably should have taken a turn off so as not to be forced to turn in for 4...

Personal strategical failures aside, the game was 'interesting' to say the least. The two people in Australia refused to fight. They both had all their armies down there, and they just didn't move. One of the guys in Europe chose to ran away, and attacked Africa. The other guy in Europe just took Europe and no one made any effort to stop him. Finally I used my turn-in to go the long way through Alaska to back door it to stop the carnage but it was a bad plan. Other people cashed in for 10+ armies and took me out before I got to go again. Oh well, on the plus side I was finished (barely) in under 2 hours which gave me time to head for an 11am game.

Pounder was up to play Tigris and Euphrates and I decided to play too. Unfortunately it was an 'A' level event which meant no demo and they expected everyone to know the rules. I'd played a couple times before, but it was 4 years ago... I figured I could pick it back up again, especially if I could glance at the nifty rules placards everyone gets.

Turns out my table was using a German board, so the rules placard was conveniently written in a language I couldn't read. I got a brief run-down of turn order during game setup, and away we went! I had fun but I misremembered one rule about how internal conflicts worked which ended up giving one of my opponents a huge lead. One of the other people in the game then made the same mistake I did a couple turns later, the same guy capitalized on it, and that was pretty much the game.

1pm, and the third Queen's Gambit heat was starting. I'd had a lot of fun the night before playing it, and there wasn't anything I was dying to play scheduled opposite it, so I signed up. I got to play the other side in this game, drawing Darth Maul. It was during this game that I learned how blocking a window didn't actually stop you from jumping from floor to roof. Once my opponent clarified that rule for me I stopped worrying about blocking her. A much better use of my droid cards was just to shoot people. I ended up winning the Jedi battle, but Darth Maul only had 1 health left. I took advantage of a rule that allowed him to run out, kill people, and then run out of line of site which let me kill a large number of her guys without fear of Maul dying. I believe I then drew a healing card for Darth Maul and he went the distance for me. Go evil!

5pm had Acquire on the schedule which Pounder and I wanted to play. Pounder had also played Queen's Gambit and his round went to time, so we couldn't get into a 3pm game if we'd wanted to. We decided an hour and a half break was a good time to go eat, so we went to the Amish diner. We weren't really in the mood for a big meal so we had a slice of pie and a milkshake each. The pie was only ok (lemon merangue but no where near as good as my mother's) but the milkshake was insane. We'd each ordered a strawberry milkshake so they made a bunch in a blender and gave us the 'leavings' in a jug along with our two large glasses. When I say strawberry I actually mean strawberry, and not just pink. There were huge hunks of real strawberries in the milkshake. We finished up our glasses and went to divvy up the rest. Turns out there was enough to fill up both of our glasses with plenty left over! When it was all said and done there was about five and a half full milkshakes in the jug, which made for a really awesome deal. (Of course, a meal of 3 milkshakes in an hour might not be the sanest thing, but it sure was tasty and filling.)

5pm was Acquire, a game of building hotels, buying stock, merging hotels, and selling stock. I got into a 4 player game with a guy who really knew the game, an older lady who kinda knew the rules, and a 13ish year old who also kinda knew the rules. This is a game where having your hotels get merged off the board is very good for you, and having your hotels get merged into large hotels is very good for you... The first merger was the kid joining two hotels he had no part of, which pretty much just gave myself and the other guy a huge lead. The kid realized what he'd done by his next turn, but it was too late to recover. (A feeling I knew all too well from Manifest Destiny the day before!) Ultimately the guy who's game it was pulled out a close victory over me with the other two nowhere near us.

7pm saw the first Puerto Rico round on the schedule. Unfortunately for me, I was completely exhausted. I didn't particularly want to play a thinking game in that state, so I wimped out and went back to the hotel to sleep early. I didn't actually end up playing PR at all over the course of the event. Robb ended up making the semifinals and Pounder lost in the quarterfinals to an annoying ruling. Someone forgot to restock the boat after a mayor phase, so instead of there being 9 on the board when Pounder was to call mayor the next turn there were only 4. They could clearly retrace everything that had happened after that mayor phase but the GM decided the ruling was 1 per player... Oddly enough that game was mentioned in the recap because it was won (barely) by the #2 indigo player who scored 69 points. I watched chunks of the game and I'm pretty sure she benefited pretty hugely from that boat miscue, but what are you going to do?


So I got to sleep by 8pm, which is something I used to do on occasion on a normal day when I work at 3am. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that I ended up waking up around 3am on Friday morning. This time also coincided with everyone else arriving back to the room. I tried to get back to sleep for a few minutes but gave up and decided to just go play DS at the conventional hall.

I wandered around for a bit first, but 4am is a shockingly quiet time. A rowdy werewolf game had just wound down and there didn't seem to be anything going on in any rooms. I went to the wargaming room where there were actually a few people looking in on 'A World at War', which is the 60+ hour long game. They were looking at games and commenting on the positions and such. They sounded knowledgeable, which is pretty crazy... You'd have to put in a lot of time playing a 60 hour game to get good enough at it to comment on board positions. (Not that I'm one to talk, having put who knows how much time into playing Titan for example!)

10am on Friday had the Queen's Gambit single elimination finals scheduled, and with two wins I was in ok position to make the top 16 but sadly wasn't a lock. It turns out the #1 tiebreaker is actually owning a copy of the game! (They need 8 copies to show up in order to actually run the round, and it's been out of print for a long time.) I managed to squeak in at position #15, one of a few people without a game who qualified. I ended up liking the game enough that I bought a copy on eBay for way more money than it originally sold so I won't be in that position next year!

I drew evil in my quarterfinal match, and the single elimination rounds played by a different rule... If no one has won after 2 hours, evil wins. This was to make sure the game actually progresses and they could play all 4 rounds in time. (Also, a pretty solid Naboo strategy is to ignore Anakin I think, assuming that if you get a stable palace position you will eventually win.) This actually came close to coming up in my game, as the game ended with 3 Naboo characters alive and like 1 minute on the clock when Anakin finally blew up the mother ship. I quite possibly lost because of not knowing a rule, I thought a deck of cards reshuffled when it didn't. Oh well, live and learn! The one thing that bothered me was a spectator who knew my opponent accused me of cheating by intentionally playing slowly to try to time the game out. Having only played twice before it did take me time to read some of the cards, but I was going as fast as I could. Perhaps more importantly my opponent actually played very slowly for the first hour or so. We were playing beside another friend of his, and they were chatting a fair bit and not playing quickly. If winning was more of a priority for me I guarantee I would have won that game, either by killing 1 more guy by taking my time planning out turns or by timing him out. That's not how I am though, and I'm rather cheezed that I was accused of cheating. At any rate, I was out in the quarterfinals by the slimmest of margins. Frowns.

I've lost track of time, and I don't know what I did until 5pm. I might have played a game of Titan, but I don't think I did. I browsed the vendor area I think, and possibly attended some demos. At 5pm was a Lost Cities draw. I hadn't played that game in at least a year, and only ever on BSW. I used to play a fair bit with Tom Gannon on there, I think. Anyway, it seemed like a fun thing to do. I sat down with my opponent, had her give me a brief rules refresher, and then off we went. Lost Cities is a card game where you play 3 hands, summing the scores over all 3 hands. After our 3 hands... We were tied! Apparently this doesn't come up very often, from the GM report it sounds like it's happened 4 times in 3 years. The tiebreaker is to play a 4th hand... In that single hand I ended up outscoring the total from the previous three... (I had a triple bonus tiled excavation with enough cards to get the 8 card bonus.) This was the 3rd heat of 4 and I seem to recall they used a weird scoring system so because I started in round 3 it was unlikely I'd make the cut to the finals... So I didn't even think about it!

7pm was the start of the single elimination Battle Line tournament. Battle Line is another card game, this one a game where you play 3 card poker on many different fronts. The way they ran this tournament was to put people into pods of 4, and have you play round robin in your pod. Overall winner of the pod advances to the next round. I was actually mentioned in the GM breakdown despite not winning my first pod, but he misspelled my name! It seems so easy, what with only having 8 letters and all, but he stuck an i into Page. Grr! I believe I finished 2-1 in my pod, but someone went 3-0 so he advanced and I didn't. (I might have been 1-2, I don't remember. Not that it matters!) It was pretty fun, and the round robin format is a pretty fair one I think. It makes sure you get 3 games in at least for signing up, which is good since it can be a pretty fast game.

Friday night has a lot of finals on it, which I wasn't a part of, so I didn't have much to do until later in the evening. I don't remember what exactly I did but I know I skipped playing the 10pm Acquire game for fear it wouldn't end by 11pm. Why does 11pm matter? Because at 11pm the single most important tournament at the convention was held. I am, of course, refering to crowning the LIARS DICE WORLD CHAMPION!!! Liar's Dice had 195 people show up, and they claim to have been the most attended event. Ticket to Ride made that same claim, and had 191 distinct people show up, but they had multiple rounds so maybe they're both right. At any rate, that's a lot of people! They had enough copies of the game to get everyone seated at once, and they made sure no one started until everyone was ready... Then in one fell swoop 975 dice were rolled and slammed onto tables in unison. That, my friends, is a lot of dice.

Now, I'd told people before I left that I was going to be the LIARS DICE WORLD CHAMPION!!! so I had my work cut out for me. Remember, I'd woken up at 3am that morning, so I was up for over 20 hours at this point. Regardless, my first round was a cake walk, I was clearly the most skilled player at my table and I'm sure I won handily despite not remembering how many dice I had left. I do remember I won pretty fast as I had what seemed like a looooong wait before the next round.

The semi-finals made me rue the creation of the exacta rule. You see, if someone calls a bluff and the bid makes exactly not just the caller loses... Everyone at the table loses a die. Three straight times around the table went bid from the girl on my right (my Queen's Gambit opponent from my second game) huge raise by me, raise by 1 by the girl to my left, call... Exacta! Everyone lose a die. After the third one of these the girl on my left (who was 14 years old and playing with a Pirates of the Carribean cup) had 5 dice left and everyone else had 1 or 2. I've blocked the rest of the game out of my mind but suffice it to say she didn't find a way to Bung up that position and won handily. And thus, my dreams of being the LIARS DICE WORLD CHAMPION!!! were crushed.

A word of warning to all... Next year I will back, and next year I will fulfill my destiny. I will prevail. I will be victorious. I will be the LIARS DICE WORLD CHAMPION!

Pounder, Robb, and Lin had gone out to a nearby 24/7 breakfast diner and had picked me up some bacon to eat after my disappointing loss. At this point I'd been up almost 24 hours... So we sat down and played one of the demo games set up in the hall. I believe this time we played a coffee plantation game where Pounder shipped a ton of white coffee on a ton of white boats with a ton of white slaves for big bucks. I remember not particularly liking the game but that may just be because we didn't know what we were doing. I know Robb and I tried to collude at one point by selling brown coffee together but colluding with someone else just seemed worse than playing for yourself as Pounder crushed us.


The Settlers of Catan tournament started at 9am Saturday morning. Robb had won this event in 2005 but I don't think he had any interest in playing in it. I know I sure didn't! It turns out they expect Settlers to be a big draw (132 people played) and most of the other games on Saturday are finals from other events. I didn't want to play Settlers and was exhausted... So I just didn't get up. Around noon I finally got up, and headed over to the site. 11am had a Puerto Rico round that I would have played in if I'd been up, but oh well. 12pm had nothing to do.

1pm saw the start of the Carcassone single elimination event along with another Risk round, a Saint Petersburgh round and a Titan:The Arena round. I kinda wanted to play both of the last two games and decided to go with the Titan spinoff. It doesn't actually have anything to do with Titan other than it uses some of the characters from that game on the cards. I ended up in an ok position, but was forced to reveal my hidden bet at a bad time in order to not lose. That put a bullseye on my head which everyone but one guy took aim at. I had to work with that guy to keep from losing, but it turned out he also had a hidden bet on the same monster and had better overall position so I ended up just helping him win... Or so I thought. Our opponents finally pulled off a coup, killing our dragon, and thus we were both screwed. Oh well, still a pretty fun card game and I really wasn't expecting to win.

3pm had either another round of Lost Cities, or another round of Manifest Destiny, or a round of Monsters Ravage which is a game where you control a monster and a branch of the military and you try to use your tanks to kill other monsters or something. I wanted to play it, but I'd missed the demos and didn't really feel like trying to pick it up on the fly. (Also, as a B event, they don't really let that happen. Attend the demo!) Lost Cities lasts an hour, Manifest Destiny lasts four, and I had nothing I wanted to do for five hours so I went with Manifest Destiny. I was kinda bitter at myself for getting blown out of my previous game and I wanted to vindicate myself.

I think the GM was happy to see me come back. (He's also the game designer.) Having someone come back for more means good things for your game, I would think! I don't remember much about this game other than that it was a lot closer than the last one and I ended up cheating to my disadvantage by not knowing the rules. (You reshuffle decks of cards, but you're supposed to leave some out. I got one of those cards which was useless at that point in the game, but didn't know I wasn't supposed to get it. Oh well!)

At both 7pm and 10pm there was a 'Wits & Wagers' game show being held. It's a party game where the host names a category and everyone writes down a numerical guess. The guesses are given odds and then you bet chips on which answer you think is closest without going over. You win chips for giving the right answer and chips for betting correctly. We wanted to play at the same time and both Robb and Pounder had a Puerto Rico semi-final at 7 so we decided to try for the 10pm session. A grand total of one event started at 8 or 9pm for me to play in (I ate leading up to 7pm so missed that start time) and it was Ticket to Ride and 8pm. Ticket to Ride was fun the first time and being the only option helped, so away I went! I played a different variant than the first time but the end result was the same. Just building long routes preferentially gave me a pretty large victory. I think the game is probably a pretty good strategy game when everyone is on the same page but man are the early rounds ever soft.

10pm and both Robb and Pounder were ready for Wits & Wagers. They had a TON of people show up, so they had everyone play on large teams if possible. Robb, Pounder, Lin and myself picked up Rick Atwater (the Titan GM) and someone else Lin met during the week and formed team Canadian Bacon. The way the game works is they ask questions that have an exact numerical answer and everyone guesses what the right answer is. For example, one of the questions asked for what year the Queen first sent an email. Another asked how many pounds the world's largest lobster was. On the lobster question in particular we thought differently than the rest of the room. Our answer was laughed at for being so small compared to everyone else's, and Robb made a joke about how we're from Canada and don't know what a pound is. Of course, it turned out we were way closer than anyone else and had bet all our chips on the 'long-shot' that it was, giving us a massive chip lead. On the final round the question asked what percentage of the US population had voted in the last election, which supposedly had a big turnout. Being mostly Canadians we had no clue, but Rich had a pretty good idea. Of course, our answer depended on if the question counted people who lived in the US but couldn't vote for citizenship/age reasons. The GM said it was complete population so us, along with everyone else in the room but one team, were way wrong with our bets. We answered the question asked, but not the question they wanted an answer to it turns out. Oh well, it was a silly event with no real prize, not even a plaque, so it didn't really matter. We still think we won though!

Unfortunately this event went beyond 11pm so we missed the silly game for the night which was Slapshot. I don't know much about the game but from listening to people talk about it it sounds a LOT like Bloodbowl on ice. I know you build teams and play people and your goons could permanently injure the other team, which sounds like the Bloodbowl I knew and loved! (Ken Rootsevear going to crush your head!) We ended up learning a really complex game in the foyer that eventually was abandoned due to Lin not liking the game and everyone being hungry. We went out to the breakfast diner which I gather is the only thing open at that hour and had a decent meal. We came back, Lin went to bed, and Robb, Pounder and I met up with a guy they'd met earlier to play a game of Notre Dame.

I don't remember his name, sadly, but he was a really nice guy. He was on his way to bed when we came back from food but all it took was the question 'game?' and he aborted sleep to play Notre Dame. He even went up to his room to get it! (Mental note: staying at the center itself means you can store games there without needing to cross a highway and spend 20 minutes getting them!) Notre Dame is a pretty fun game with a draft component to it, where you draft roles and then perform the actions you drafted. It's a euro-game so you're trying to score victory points while managing the resources that will let you score more victory points later. A unique aspect of the game is that there is a 'rat count' in your segment of town and if you let it get too high you get plagued. You can draft cards that let you reduce the rat count... But then you're not making moneys or scoring points! It's a delicate balance, as all good euro-games are, and was a lot of fun.

After that Pounder went to be claiming something about having to drive home the next day. Robb and I had slept in that morning and as such had NO interest is sleeping. There was a werewolf game in progress that we watched and then tagged into. Apparently this group had been playing every night all week and the game was getting a little inbred as it seemed like the same people were yelling at each other the whole time. I've played the game a few times in online forums but never in person before. I must say it's kinda fun but I'm really horrible at it. I'm much better at keeping cool under fire and debating online than in person. Oh well, it was still fun and there really wasn't any other options at that hour of the day. Eventually the game broke up so Robb and I went and had breakfast at the hotel (yay still being up at 7am?) and then passed out. There were only 5 non-final games being run on Sunday and while I've played 3 of them before I didn't feel like not-sleeping to play them. (They were Diplomacy, Ticket to Ride, and Transamerica.) At 11am was the Ticket to Ride final which I was qualified for I'm sure due to winning the first two rounds but Pounder wasn't terribly interested in staying until 3pm while I won that event and I didn't really want to play in it either. I'd had to solo pack the hotel room on not much sleep before checkout time since Robb and Pounder were playing in finals and Lin just talked on the phone and watched as I packed everything. *frowns* At any rate... No gaming on Sunday but still fun times.


As far as things I know I did but forgot when they happened...

I attended multiple demos for games I wasn't interested in playing after seeing them in action. I watched demos for 3 stock-car racing games... 2 of which were designed so you couldn't get too far behind which ultimately meant the first N-1 turns of the game were irrelevant and the third of which was basically just a math game in a formula-1 disguise. I kinda wanted to play that one, liking math as much as I do, but it conflicted with something else I think.

I also attended the GANGSTERS! demo, which was a game I'd read about beforehand and was trying to convince Robb and Pounder to play. The demo convinced us that there's no way we wanted to play it in an event though. I kinda still wanted to play it for fun with just people I know though. For some reason I'm think Dave would have a lot of fun with that game.

There were two different fishing games in the demo area and I know I played both of them with Robb, Pounder, and random people who were passing by as I read the rules. None of them were very good.

I saw some people playing World of Warcraft: The Board Game! I think one team had both warrior and druid on it and hence was completely dominant.

Rich Atwater taught us to play a weird trick taking game at some point. Basically you deal out the cards and then there's a round of bidding. When you bid you play cards from your hand face up on the table, going in a circle having to pass or beat the previous bid. Eventually everyone but one person passes and they are declarer. They have to call a trump suit from the cards they played as their bid. They name either colour or rank as trump. (So all the 4s could be trump!) Then the person who was #2 in bidding names one of their bid cards as second trump. Second trump beats normal cards, Main trump beats second trump. Then declarer picks someone (not the second bidder) to be their partner. Those two play against everyone else, with the goal being to take the most 'points' worth of cards very similar to TICHU and 200. It was fun but we only got to play a couple hands.

Speaking of Tichu, I also played a few hands of that with some Titan players while waiting for a Titan game to start at some point. Fun game. Must play more of it on BSW!

Lin, Robb, Pounder and I also played an archaelogy game where you move around the board spending time researching to become 'good' at digging, and then go to dig sites. Once there you can spend turns 'digging', which means reach into the bag for that site and pull out X items. The items are either points, stat boosts, or nothing. After you finish digging keep all the stuff, put the nothing back in the bag, and pass the turn. So there's a delicate balance in trying to get a lot of pulls from the bag but also making sure you get there before someone takes all the treasure. It was an interesting mechanic though Robb was pretty bitter at how much rubble he kept pulling out. He'd focused on a couple different colour ruins and Lin and I cleaned them out before he got there I think. Meanwhile Pounder just hung around in Europe giving lectures about things while the rest of us actually did dirty work digging... I enjoyed the game but didn't think it was terribly good. I would play it again though!


Summary to follow tomorrow...